'The one downside to selling your own home is doing the viewings - but a lot of our estate agents expected us to do that anyway. So, just what do estate agents do for their money?' asks Mat Waugh, a 35-year-old accounts director at a London publishing company. He and his wife recently sold their two-bed Edwardian flat in Hanwell, west London for £250,000.

The couple paid £398 in fees to have the flat listed online at Hatched.co.uk - a sum that covered photographs, floor plans and 'shuffling the paperwork', but otherwise the couple handled the sale themselves. 'We had three local estate agents around and, frankly, nothing convinced me that they were going to be worth us paying £4,000 commission,' says Mat. 'Anyway, it's hardly rocket science. The property programmes tell you how to make your home presentable. We didn't go as far as having bread baking in the oven or coffee brewing in the kitchen - we didn't have to. We sold at the right price in two weeks.'

The new breed of private-sale websites and bargain online estate agents claim to be doing well despite the credit crunch and a jittery property market. The classified-ads site gumtree.com reckons its listings have almost doubled in volume in the wake of the Northern Rock crisis. 'In the past four months, as the combined impact of rising interest rates, costs of home information packs and a volatile financial market are felt across the market, we've seen a 94 per cent spike in the number of direct listings of homes for sale,' reports Gumtree's spokeswoman Sophy Silver. 'It reflects a money-saving mood among sellers, especially as house prices now show signs of dipping.'

According to Gumtree's survey of over 1,300 adults, more than nine out of 10 of us (92 per cent) are convinced that estate agents 'do not justify their high fees' and more than two-thirds (69 per cent) did not feel their agent was 'professional' or 'good value for money'. This, perhaps, is not surprising - estate agents are never going to win any popularity contests. But we still appear to be reluctant to dispense with their services: according to the Office of Fair Trading, 90 per cent of people selling a property still use one.

So how easy is it to go it alone? 'Private selling isn't for everyone, particularly those who lack the time or confidence to arrange and conduct viewings and negotiate with potential buyers,' reckons James Tallack, a senior researcher at the consumer rights group Which?. 'However, if this doesn't bother you, then there are huge savings to be made.'

As Tallack points out, you don't have to commit to either a private sale or an estate agent. Instead you can sign a 'sole agency' agreement so that, although you are tied to one estate agent, you can still sell privately and avoid commission. He explains: 'As long as you have a sole agency agreement and you're sure that the website you're using isn't doing anything that could be classified as "estate agency work", there's nothing to stop you using an estate agent and selling privately.' That said, fees paid to private-sales sites are non-refundable. Also, you must be honest about your property if you are selling privately or risk being sued for misrepresentation.

Typically, a 'traditional' estate agent's commission is between 1 per cent and 2.5 per cent, and on average sellers pay them £4,151 (based on a 1.9 per cent commission and the average cost of a UK house of £218,479). These fees are greatly undercut by two types of online competitor. First, the private-sales sites (such as houseweb.co.uk, mypropertyforsale.co.uk, or thelittlehousecompany.co.uk) which start from £47 for a service that typically buys you an online advertisement, photo and description (Gumtree, which is effectively a general-purpose online noticeboard, is free for property ads.) Secondly, there are the online estate agents, which have a radically different commission structure to agents on the high street, such as halfapercent.com, which, as the name suggests, charges 0.5 per cent commission, and hatched.co.uk, which charges £398 for its most popular service.

Why do we bother with estate agents? 'If there is a shortage of property and a high demand, as long as you're fairly sensible, you are almost bound to attract interest in your own property,' admits Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents. 'But even in a good market, if somebody is selling privately, will they be able to do as good a job as a good-quality estate agent? Will they be able to negotiate the best price? Can they really check out all the buyers' credentials? Can they try and help control the chain?'

These are issues regardless of the state of the property market, Bolton King says. 'When you get these tougher markets, as we did in the early 1990s, then the good-quality estate agents really show what they are made of,' he insists.

Selling your home is often about online visibility - eight out of 10 would-be buyers start property searches on the web, not on the high street. One limitation to going down the do-it-yourself route is that the private-sale sites generally don't have access to the big online 'property portals' that aggregate estate agents' sales listings (although online estate agents do). The biggest portal, rightmove.co.uk, reckons to list some 950,000 UK properties.

This lack of access has been the subject of some bitterness and dispute: Martin Charlick of Thelittlehouse

company complains that the portals are being 'downright restrictive,' whereas Rightmove insists that its policy is to accept advertising only from estate agents 'whose property descriptions are subject to the requirements of the Property Misdescriptions Act 1991'.

Its spokesman added: 'Our approach ensures that our users are given access to accurate property details. This would be impossible to monitor if we were to accept advertising from private sellers.'

None the less, Charlick claims that Thelittlehousecompany's £135 package offers access to 500 sites and potentially 3 million visitors a month. And according to Trevor Gillham of fellow private-sale site Mypropertyforsale, 'not being able to advertise on Rightmove is not really a disadvantage. There is enough exposure of the website to reach all buyers looking for property.'

Treat it like a business

'The views are amazing. You sit on the balcony with a gin-and-tonic and look across to France and the lights of Boulogne and Calais,' says John Cotter, 46, who until recently was sales director for a private hotel chain. Now he is selling his four-bed Kent home and moving to Zurich with his girlfriend.

Cotter has gone the do-it-yourself route, setting up a website (www.temeraireheights.com) to sell his house. That G&T moment is artfully recreated on the site with a photograph of the view of the English Channel from his balcony.

'If I'd put the house on the market through an agent, I'd have paid about £25,000 in fees. If I can sell it without the agent, that's a plus,' says Cotter. 'A lot of estate agents haven't embraced new technology, the marketing and sales ideas of the 21st century, so I thought I'd treat my own house as a business and push it that way.'

The house, on the market at £995,000, had been with an estate agent, but that only prompted a couple of expressions of interest. The website, which cost £500 and took less than two days to organise, is being supported by a viral email campaign to City businesses. So far the site alone has led to two viewings, plus an approach from an upmarket London-based estate agent to market the property ('they normally won't look at anything under £2.5m').

'It's generated more interest than the estate agent managed in two months,' he adds. 'A lot of people told me I'd never sell in this market and that has fired me up. Estate agents always sell houses, but why can't we do it ourselves?'